My career has been built around my love of fieldwork, generally involving caving or exploring weird and wonderful parts of the world – where I've collected ancient and modern samples of animals and plants, sediments, water and other materials. I specialize in developing new ways to extract detailed genetic signals from the past, to study ancient environments and the impacts of climate and human caused changes. I started my ancient research in Allan Wilson’s Lab at UC Berkeley with Svante Pääbo in 1989, performing some of the first ancient DNA studies and building the field standards for ancient DNA. I then pioneered genetic studies of extinct animals and methods to analyse ancient skeletons. My main interest has always been research that spans multiple disciplines (eg maths, geology, physics, climate, molecular biology) and inventing unconventional approaches to answer big picture questions. I have a broad background that ranges across climate change, environmental science, genomics, and evolution, with many unusual detours. I specialise in building international teams of multi-disciplinary experts interested in tackling major scientific questions. Recent examples include the history of humans as we left Africa and dispersed around the world, the role of geomagnetism and solar weather in climate and evolution, and microbiology and human dental health and medicine.

• environmental DNA/microbiomes
• climate change
• genetic selection/adaptation
• genomics
• evolution
• microbiology
• palaeontology
• archaeology/paleoanthropology
• solar weather
• geomagnetism
• molecular dating